About

Read

Staying up to date on R packages

March 17, 2011
by Karthik Ram.
Average Reading Time: less than a minute.

Unless you regularly use particular R packages, it’s becomes difficult to stay on top of updates and bug fixes. Updates usually also include significant improvements in performance. I wrote this short snippet of code which I run about once a month to keep up on updates. This short bit of code will give you a list of changes and decide which ones to update:

One comment on ‘Staying up to date on R packages’

You might be interested in the function `old.packages()` which tries to do what your code does. Also, note that if you have installed a version of a package that is newer than the one on CRAN (say a version from R-Forge) then your code will list it even though the local version is newer.